Exposing the global warming racket

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We've seen the ominous imagery a thousand times -- the smoke-belching power plants, huge cliffs of ice cascading into the sea and sad polar bears adrift on shriveling ice floes.

We've had the official Gospel of Catastrophic Global Climate Change preached at us so often by the mainstream media our pets have it memorized.

All together now: The planet is getting hotter. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Fragile species are disappearing. Coral reefs are dying. Hurricanes are more powerful. Droughts are more prolonged. Floods and heavy rainstorms are more numerous.

According to Al Gore and a chorus of the planet's top climate scientists, blame for all of the above -- plus every bad, annoying or odd natural event that happens on Earth from now until the Sun implodes -- can be pinned with certainty on global warming caused by 200 years of mankind spewing excess CO2 into the air.

But is it really true that New York City will be two-stories deep in ocean water in a century or two?

No one knows. Despite what Professor Gore says, the science of climate change is still far too complex and uncertain for most scientists to understand the present, much less predict the distant future.

Most ordinary citizens -- i.e., the scientifically challenged -- are even more in the dark about what or whom to believe about global warming, thanks in large part to the mainstream media, which, with few exceptions, have become willing press agents for global warming alarmists.

But most people would stop their global worrying if they looked at the big picture and long run. For starters, we are at the tail end of an ice age that began about 40 million years ago. Ice sheets like the one that covered most of the Northern Hemisphere until about 20,000 years ago have come and gone in 40,000- and 100,000-year cycles.

Unless man-spewn greenhouse gases do raise Earth's temperature and keep it there permanently, or unless Mother Earth fixes her own wobbly axis or smooths out her eccentric orbit around the sun, we have a rendezvous with a future ice age no matter how many carbon taxes we implement or SUVs we drive.

Also, please stop worrying about the planet's 67,000-plus glaciers melting. Glaciers have retreated and advanced for eons. If every glacier not on Greenland or Antarctica disappeared in 1,000 years -- and no one is saying they will -- sea level would rise about 18 inches. By the way, about 90 percent of all of Earth's ice is in Antarctica -- and it's not shrinking.

As for those rising sea levels• It's not so scary if you know they've been rising for the last 18,000 years -- when they were about 400 feet lower -- thanks to the melting of millions of square miles of glaciers that existed during the last ice age.

In the past 100 years, according to global warming worrywarts, average sea levels have gone up about 174 millimeters -- 1.7 millimeters a year. That's .06 inches. Not too impressive when you know the Himalayas are still rising an average of nearly 5 millimeters each year and Australia is drifting toward the tropics at about 50 millimeters per year.

Of course, according to the global warming lobby, if we don't do something now to slow CO2 production, sea levels will surge and life is going to get hotter and harder for our grandchildren, who because of fossil-fuelish mankind will never get to hug a polar bear. But as we all know -- or should by now -- there are five times as many polar bears today as there were 50 years ago.

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